Amazon’s website faced disruptions on 31 January 2013 after its main shopping website was reportedly targetted by hackers.

Amazon told AFP that the gateway page of Amazon.com was offline to some customers for approximately 49 minutes.

Hackers claimed responsibility for the outage on a Twitter page, however sources told AFP that no outside group was responsible for the brief outage.

"Other pages of the site were accessible and AWS was not impacted," the online retailer said.

Amazon Web Services rents out datacentre power in the cloud to Internet firms including online video service Netflix.

The online retailer earlier suffered high profile crashes at Amazon Web Services, which even knocked Netflix offline in June 2012 and again at Christmas 2012.